Coal Mining

Coal had been used in ancient times, but Thomas Jefferson was looking toward the future of the young United States. In the summer of 1803, as Meriwether Lewis prepared for his expedition across Upper Louisiana, President Jefferson told him to record mineral resources of every kind; but more particularly metals, limestone, pit coal, & saltpetre.^[1]Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783–1854 (2nd ed., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 1:63.

Saltpeter was used in ammunition, as well as in explosives that men could use to sculpt the land. Limestone was used for construction, as well as in processing iron ore. The Earth’s metals, both base and precious, had become the tools and ornaments of civilization. But coal—that was the basic natural resource of the future! Jefferson had only to look to Great Britain, already fifty years into the Industrial Revolution, to see what was coming.

Ancient Romans heated the waters of their public baths with it, as did the Chinese whom Marco Polo met, although Europeans at the time would laugh at the thirteenth-century Venetian adventurer’s tale of “black stones” that burned. The Chinese worked metal into tools over coal’s heat, and Native Americans in the Southwest made pottery in coal-fired kilns. In coal-rich Wales, funeral pyres four millenia ago burned with coal. And when Roman armies invaded Brittania 2,000 years ago, soldiers located their campsites beside convenient coal outcroppings.^[2]Gail Stewart, Coal Miners (Crestwood House, 1988), p. 10 From their arrival in the seventeenth century, American colonists similarly took advantage of coal found near the surface, by digging pits in, or adjacent to, convenient veins. Thus the term “pit-coal.”

Thomas Jefferson documented the known pit-coal coal resources in the United States in his Notes on the State of Virginia. The vicinity of his home at Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia, was “replete with mineral coal of a very excellent quality,” which before the War for Independence had been worked “to an extent equal to the demand.” The whole country between the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi River was believed to contain coal. “The coal at Pittsburg [sic],” wrote Jefferson, “is of very superior quality.” A coal bed nearby had been “afire since 1765.”^[3]Thomas Jefferson wrote his Notes on the State of Virginia in response to a query from François Barbé-Marbois, the secretary of the French legation in Paris, in 1871, and by popular request … Continue reading

A decade after the Lewis and Clark Expedition, a traveler in the “western country” near today’s Butler, Pennsylvania, described how locals used bituminous coal along Conequenessing Creek:

Here we saw a coal mine. On examination, we found the incumbent strata to be shale, or clay slate . . . We observed both yesterday and to day, . . . that slaty stones appeared in many places where the road was dug, and, doubtless, coal would soon be discovered by exploring. It is sold at the pit’s mouth for sixpence a bushel, and is preferred by the inhabitants to wood for fuel,..’the blaze being so brilliant as to supersede the use of candles, even for sewing.^[4]David Thomas, Travels Through the Western Country in the Summer of 1816. Facsimile of the 1819 edition; Introduction by John W. Wells, Foreword by George W. White. Reprinted in Volume 6 of George W. … Continue reading

Eventually, coal deposits would be found in nearly three-fourths of the fifty states, and their product would fuel the Industrial Revolution when the United States joined Europe in that epochal change.

Aware that the Industrial Revolution in the United States was a half-century behind Great Britain’s, President Jefferson was eager to know what potentials resided in the real estate Congress had recently okayed, the Louisiana Purchase. Self-sufficiency was one of the cardinal values of Jeffersonian Republicanism.

But the coal-powered country would face many blessings, and a few monumental curses.

Change to Coal and Coke

As the 18th century approached, England was running out of trees to convert to charcoal, the fuel used to smelt its iron ore and dry the malt for its beer. Brewers had tried the nation’s plentiful coal, but as its fumes dried out the malt they added an unpleasant sulfurous taste. Then brewers discovered that they could make coke from coal, much the same way charcoal was made from wood. Coke didn’t hurt the malt’s flavor, and it burned hotter than coal.

In 1709 (two years after England, Wales, and Scotland joined together as the United Kingdom), an English ironworker named Abraham Darby developed a process for smelting iron ore by using coke. Meanwhile, Englishman Thomas Newcomen was experimenting with harnessing steam to power marchinery and, around 1712, he presented his reciprocating steam engine to the world.

In it, pressurized steam and cold water were sent alternately into a metal chamber. The abrupt temperature change created a vacuum that pulled a piston down. Attached to the piston, an arm moved; to pull the piston back up, a counterweight was attached to the arm. The first and most important benefit of the steam engine was to pump water from ever-deepening mine shafts.

But Scotsman James Watt really gave the Industrial Revolution a kick forward in the 1760s and 1770s. His steam engine separated Newcomen’s metal chamber into two: one for hot steam and one kept cold to condense the steam. Heat and cold alternately acted on the same piston, driving it both up and down. Gears and cranks attached to this “reciprocating engine” converted steam’s energy to operate complex machinery.

And that steam was created by hot fires under the water boilers, fires that burned coke, making coal mining more important than ever. Although trees had become scarce, the British Isles had plenty of coal.

In the United States, however, coal and coke were slow to find favor. Many iron smelters believed mineral coal to be inferior to charcoal of wood, partly because coal, especially the anthracite variety, introduced sulfur into the metal, which had to be extracted by another process. Besides, since there were still plenty of virgin forests in the U.S., charcoal was cheaper than mineral coal. Not until the 1840s were coal and coke used in the U.S. for refining iron ore, and only after the middle of the nineteenth century were they in general use.^[5]Carroll Pursell, The Machine in America; A Social History of Technology (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 61.

Factories

With steam power, “manufactories” (from Latin manu factum, “made by hand”) could be built anywhere, not just beside waterways that turned millwheels to power the machinery. Workers moved to live near manufactories, helping towns develop and cities grow. It was the beginning of the end for one of Jefferson’s ideals, the self-supporting yeoman farmer.

Hand in hand, coal and iron led the Industrial Revolution, which spread from Britain to other nations rich in both raw materials. Aware that Pennsylvania and Virginia coal deposits were already being mined, President Jefferson was eager for the Lewis and Clark Expedition to locate generous supplies in the Louisiana Territory.

The Industrial Revolution was supporting Britain as the greatest colonial power, as that nation drew raw materials from its own land and its worldwide colonies then sold manufactured goods at home and abroad. But throughout the 19th century, the United States continued adding more coal-fired factories and gaining on Britain. New England becaame the nation’s first factory center, utilizing materials like cotton collected from the South and shoe-leather from the Midwest.

Coal also was used to produce electricity as soon as the latter was harnessed in the late 19th century, at first pumping pistons and then, in the early 1900s, turning turbines to light city streets and homes. Although today’s turbine systems are cleaner and much more sophisticated, three-fourths of United States coal still is burned to make the nation’s electricity.

Locomotives

By the 1850s, the U.S. neared Britain in industrial productivity, meaning that coal had to be moved to the factories from where it was found and mined—and once again the steam engine was the answer.

Just at the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Briton Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) and American engineer Oliver Evans (1755-1819), had been perfecting the high-pressure steam engine. This type could be built small enough to be portable.

Trevithick experimentally attached his to passenger carriages in 1801 and 1803, and in 1804 produced a steam locomotive for a Welsh coal mine. It could move 25 tons of coal, but was too large and heavy to serve its intended purpose efficiently. In the United States, Evans patented his engine in 1804, and the same year demonstrated his amphibious dredge—the nation’s first self-propelled land vehicle.

Steam engines were refined and shrunk in size, with Britain still ahead of the United States when it introduced passenger railroad carriages pulled by steam locomotives in the 1820s. The progress gap between the nations was narrowing, though. On Christmas Day of 1830, the United States’ first steam locomative made a run.

So it was that, in the 1850s, coal from the mines was pulled by coke-fired steam locomotives over iron rails to many types of factories, including those that made coke from the coal and separated iron from its ore. (New rails were made of steel—a product of iron—beginning in the 1850s.)

Within four decades the first transcontinental railroad line spanned the nation’s midriff, crossing the Corps of Discovery’s path at Omaha. In 1883, the Northern Pacific touched more of the Lewis and Clark Trail as it crossed North Dakota, Montana, and northern Idaho en route to Tacoma, Washington.

In 1893, the northernmost transcontinental railroad, the Great Northern, laid rails over Marias Pass on its course from St. Paul to Puget Sound—Marias Pass being named after the Marias River, which Meriwether Lewis had titled for his cousin Maria Wood eighty-eight years earlier.^[6]Michael P. Malone and Richard B. Roeder, Montana: A History of Two Centuries (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1976), p. 135.

The States depended hugely on steam-driven (that is, coal-powered) locomotives into the 1940s, with the largest such locomotives ever, nicknamed “Big Boys,” being built from 1941 to 1944 to move the tremendous load of freight that World War II demanded. (Diesel passenger locomotives had been around since 1934.) After the war, coal-powered steam engines began to give way to diesel-electric engines until the transition was compete in 1960.

Homes

After the Civil War, individual cities often bragged about their prosperity and progress by advertising how many factory smokestacks and home chimneys threw plumes of coal smoke into their air. This prosperity had a certain pervasive smell about it, one recorded by Meriwether Lewis in future Montana on April 10, 1805.

at the distance of 12 miles from our encampment of last night we arrived at the lower point of a bluff on the Lard side; about 1½ miles down this bluff from this point, the bluff is now on fire and throws out considerable quantities of smoke which has a strong sulphurious smell.

Home-heating furnaces, also coal-powered, had come into use in the late 1800s. The preferred fuel was anthracite coal because it burned cleaner. Yet coal soot was in the air and on the ground, gathering moisture under certain atmospheric conditions to create thick “pea soup” fog, and soaking into and blackening the surfaces of stone and brick buildings. Coal—and its byproducts—literally permeated life in the United States for more than a century. But in the 20th century, cleaner-burning natural gas and petroleum byproducts steadily replaced coal for factory power.

Coal Tar Byproducts

Following the practice of one of President Jefferson’s thrifty yeoman farmers, that of “using all of the pig but its oink,” the coal industry has developed many uses for the black viscous liquid called coal tar, the main leftover when bituminous coal is cooked to produce coke. Gases also are drawn out of the coke oven and burned as coal gas for heating factories and homes in nations that don’t have the generous supplies of cleaner-burning natural gas found in the United States. This process was one of the first uses of chemistry as an applied science. And, as with so many scientific discoveries, the beginning of the coal tar products industry was an accident.

An eighteen-year-old Englishman, William Perkin,^[7]Simon Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001) is the biography of Perkin, whose work moved chemistry from theory to … Continue reading was trying to make artificial quinine—the treatment for malaria, a mosquito-borne illness that affected the Lewis and Clark Expedition. “Doctor” Lewis gave the men Peruvan bark from his medicine chest when they suffered malarial chills and fever; unknown to anyone at the time, quinine was the bark’s active ingredient.

Instead of quinine, though, young Perkin was left with some purplish powder. More experimentation led him to realize that this substance worked as a textile dye, producing a light pinkish-purple shade he called mauve.

Perkin’s 1856 “failure” was the discovery of the first synthetic dye. When Queen Victoria wore mauve to the wedding of one of her five daughters, the color became high fashion, and the future of dyes derived from coal tar was guaranteed. Later, the color even was used to name part of her era.^[8]Thomas Beer, The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteeth Century (1926; reprint Carroll & Graf, 1997). Journalist Beer quoted the definition of mauve as “pink trying to be … Continue reading Synthetic dyes also could create many more colors than were available from organic sources. Perkin became a rich man, but remained torn between his love of theoretical chemistry and his success with its applied form.

Besides dye, many other coal tar byproducts are still in use, although similar materials derived from petroleum and natural gas have joined them, and replaced some. Here are some of coal’s byproducts:

19th-Century Mines

Historically, coal mining has been one of the most dangerous of of all human occupations. Today, automation has improved safety to a considerable degree, reducing the hazard level to that of construction, or agriculture.^[9]From Commonwealth of Pennsylvania website, www.dep.state.pa.us/dep/deputate/enved/go_with_inspector/coalmine Coal mining has also injured the earth, although legislation in the late 20th century compelled the industry to reclaim and rehabilitate sites.

In the mid-19th century, all the work was done by hand, and by low-paid workers. In underground mines, men dug the coal with picks and shovels after blasting entries into the veins, called “seams,” of the mineral. They filled “ore tubs”—wooden crates with curved, rocker-like bottoms—that women or children pulled away. For this “horse work,” as one woman called it, she wore a body harness attached to ropes or chains that extended between her knees to the ore tub. In a low-ceilinged tunnel, she had to crawl on hands and knees, dragging her burden of from 100 to 300 pounds.

She delivered the coal to a vertical shaft, where “pit-brow lassies” hoisted it to the surface, where young “breaker boys” picked out shale and other non-coal rock as the minerals went by on a conveyor belt. Even the boys who escaped more serious maiming, such as crushed hands, arms, or legs, ended up with hunched backs from the bent-over posture during their growing years, giving rise to the miners’ saying that such a man “had his boy to carry” for the rest of his life.

Where horses and mules pulled underground ore trams, “trap boys” (and girls) waited alone, sometimes standing in cold water and with no light, by doors between mine sections, their only job to open the door when a tram car came along. Getting caught by a heavily-laden runaway tram could mean losing limbs between the wheels and the track.

The human mine employees worked 12 or more hours a day, six days a week. The four-legged animals, once taken underground, lived their entire lives there.^[10]Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Growing Up in Coal Country (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1996), p. 57.

For all but a handful of summer days, people went to the mine in the dark, worked in the dark, and returned home in the dark. If the children received any formal education at all, it came from church schools on Sundays.

Miners had to rent their homes from their employer, in a company town built at the mine. They had to buy everything on credit from a company-owned store, including necessary work equipment and supplies of fuses and blasting powder. They bought electricity from the company as well, and received the services of company-paid police and firefighters.^[11]A young adult book that includes descriptions of historic mining practices is Milton Meltzer, Cheap Raw Material: How Our Youngest Workers Are Exploited and Abused (Viking, 1994). In-depth coverage … Continue reading

There was the constant danger of cave-ins that crushed miners, or trapped them underground for slower deaths. Coal could catch fire, producing carbon monoxide gas. The primitive warning system for that odorless, deadly gas was a caged canary; with its high metabolism, a canary would die quickly when carbon monoxide reached it, giving miners a chance to escape to fresh air.

And through it all, everyone who breathed the coal dust floating in the air was developing silicosis from the insoluble mineral. The miners called it simply, and accurately, “black lung.”

Labor Improvements

In 1842, the British Parliament responded to the report of a commission headed by Lord Ashley and passed the Miners and Collieries Act. At the time, this seemed like a major humanitarian gesture because it prohibited women, and children under the age of 13, from working underground.

In the United States, such protection at the national level took nearly a century longer to achieve. Although reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries managed to obtain state laws prohibiting employment of children under age 12, large coal companies fought attempts to enact a national law. The first U.S. federal Child Labor Act lasted only four years before being declared unconstitutional in 1916, and the second one lasted only from 1919 to 1922. A campaign for a constitutional amendment failed two years after that, but when jobs for everyone were scarce during the Great Depression, a national law at last stood. Beginning in 1938, it was illegal for products sold across state lines to be mined by children younger than 18.^[12]Meltzer, Cheap Raw Material, pp. 80, 83-84.

The United Mine Workers of America labor union dates from 1890, when a group of smaller unions joined together. Exclusively for coal miners, the union continues today. Organizing was often bloody, when miners demonstrated publicly and were attacked by coal-company police. Miners and their families suffered when the miners called strikes, withdrawing labor—their only asset—from company owners. One of the UMW’s early victories was winning the eight-hour work day for coal miners in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Following World War II, the union reluctantly agreed to increased automation in coal mines. Although this diminished the number of available mining jobs, it improved safety conditions.

Today’s underground miners wear respirators. Coal dust is held down by sprinklers, and by mining machinery equipped with water sprayers. Improved ventilation systems more efficiently circulate fresh air through the mines. Coal companies are required give their employees training in first-aid and safety also.^[13]Gail Stewart, Coal Miners (Crestwood House, 1988), pp. 42-43. In 2001, only forty-two U.S. miners died on the job.

Today there are 130,000 miners in the United States; 3,300 of them are women.^[14]National Mining Association., www.nma.org

Coal mining is a messy business, especially when done in shafts deep underground. Using explosives and giant shovels, strip mining removes the “overburden” (earth, and the vegetation it supports, resting on top of coal deposits) and then the coal itself, creating pits that can lead to mudslides, flooding, and soil erosion of surrounding unmined lands. However, a new technology called auger mining, digs beneath the surface to remove coal without leaving visible traces.

Since 1977, the federal Surface Mining Law has provided funding for mine reclamation. Fees collected from mining companies (35 cents per ton of surface coal, 15 cents per ton of underground coal, and 10¢ per ton of lignite) go into the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fund along with fines, other payments, and interest earned from the fund’s principal. Beginning on January 1, 1978, in its first 23 and a half years, the fund reached nearly $6.5 billion.

Half of that money is turned over to states and Indian nations that have federally-approved reclamation programs. The other half supports Federal Reclamation Program administration, emergency and other special projects, additional state reclamation programs, and the Abandoned Mine Land Fund. In federal fiscal year 2002, that fund held $910.7 million, its highest state shares being $339.4 million for Wyoming, $113.5 million for Kentucky, $111.5 million for West Virginia, $53.2 million for Pennsylvania, and $41.2 for Montana.^[16]Funding figures from United States Department of Interior, Office of Surface Mining, www.osmre.gov/ (accessed 02/02).

But sometimes replacing the surface to a viable natural state is not enough. Sacred surface features such as springs and ancient pictographs cannot be recreated. The Northern Cheyenne people, whose Montana reservation overlies a portion of the Fort Union Formation, sued the federal government three times during the 1960s and 1970s, seeking to prevent building of 40 planned coal-fired electricity generating plants on or near the reservation. Private corporations had leased half of reservation lands for coal extraction, but royalties paid to owners varied from 15 cents to $1 per ton. The Cheyenne wanted to regain control over their own land, and succeeded in 1980 when the government voided the corporations’ leases.

Elsewhere in the United States, mining and air-pollution programs now work to mitigate other problems caused by coal mining, such as polluted water leaking from underground mines, and air pollution from coal-fired power plants. Exhaust from such plants now passes through “scrubbers” in the smokestacks, which remove much of the sulfur dioxide. Other gadgets remove much of the fine “fly ash,” which then is used in fertilizer, and in concrete to improve how well it can be shaped.

Thirty-six of the 50 states have coal deposits, and the United States produced more than 1.12 billion tons of coal in 2001 (exporting 49 million tons). Today, however, about seven-tenths of the nation’s coal comes from surface mines.^[17]Production statistics from the National Mining Association, www.nma.org/ The U.S. ties with Russia and China as first-place coal producer in the world.

West Virginia’s soft coal has been mined underground for more than a century, and plenty is left; this state also leads the nation in soft-coal production, with Kentucky coming in second. Other primary producers include Pennsylvania with both bituminous coal and the US’s only anthracite mines, and Ohio with surface and underground coal. Wyoming, with soft coal under 40% of its land, is also a major producer. Its northeastern corner is part of the Fort Union formation, which extends under northeastern Wyoming, eastern Montana, western North and South Dakota, and two Canadian provinces.

At the usage rate of the beginning of the 21st century, world-wide accessible coal deposits (as deep as 1,500 feet)^[18]Gail Stewart, Coal Miners (Crestwood House, 1988). are estimated to last for 250 to 300 years. More coal rests so many thousands of feet below earth’s surface that it can be reached only with the invention of new technology—which is, after all, the way the coal story always has gone.

Lewis and Clark Plant Specimens

Meanwhile, some of the plant specimens Lewis collected, which are now at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, are serving a purpose no one could have imagined until a few years ago. Analysis of selected specimens has provided scientists a baseline for measuring the amount of carbon dioxide that coal and other fossil fuels have imparted to earth’s atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

On the other hand, the coal beds Lewis and Clark discovered are now the sources of another, cheaper fuel with its own attendant evils. Methane contained in the Fort Union Formation, as well as elsewhere throughout the West, burns much cleaner than lignite, but the process of extraction brings up salt water that cannot be put back where it came from. Dumped on the surface, it sterilizes previously productive ranchlands near methane wells, and then pollutes sweet-water aquifers.

Glossary

anthracite Hard coal that is mostly carbon and burns cleanly.

bituminous Soft coal that burns with a large flame and plenty of smoke.

charcoal A black substance of carbon and ash typically made by heating wood while depriving it of oxygen.

clinker Waste rock left behind when flammable minerals are burned at very high temperatures.

coal A hard mineral that is flammable, and gives off heat and light. It forms when decayed vegetable matter is compacted by Earth’s crust. From soft to hard, giving less heat to more heat, the main types are lignite, subbituminous, bituminous, and anthracite.

coke a fuel with high carbon content typically made by baking coal.

formation In geology, a group of deposits, near each other, of the same type of rock.

lava What molten rock (magma) from inside Earth is called when it reaches the surface, spewed out by a volcano or leaking through fissures (cracks). At the moment it reaches the air, lava has a temperature of around 1500 to 2100 degrees Fahrenheit, and is literally red hot.

lignite The type of coal that first develops when peat is compacted. Lignite is high in water and low in carbon and sulfur, and so gives off less heat than do longer-compacted (called “harder”) types of coal. Lignite is the type of coal Lewis and Clark saw.

member In geology, one of component deposits that make up a formation.

mudstone At the edges of ancient freshwater lakes, mudstone is formed when layers of rock and minerals are compacted under pressure.

peat When plants have partially decayed and been compacted in layers by pressure from above, the result is called peat. If left alone for eons, it turns into coal. All over the world, however, people have dug up peat todry and use for fuel. Peat also is used as a fertizler for plants, and even a packing material or bedding for cows, horses, and so on, if it dries light and fluffy.

pumice Actually volcanic glass, this stone was liquid, melted rock when it was expelled from a volcano.The air cooled it so quickly that it didn’t form crystals again, but filled with tiny holes. In Lewis and Clark’s time pumice was valued as a gentle abrasive, and it still is.

sandstone When sand is compacted hard and long by pressures from layers above it—which sometimes hold other minerals that act as glue—it turns to sandstone. The stone comes in many different colors, because of the minerals in the sand. It can also include organic matter, such as fossils of animals or leaves that were trapped in the sand before it was compacted into rock.

scoria True scoria is lava that has cooled slowly in the air, and formed rough rocks. As used in western North Dakota and eastern Montana, though, the term refers to slow-burned, exposed coal beds that have turned red or pink.

soft coal a synonym for bituminous coal.